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Gotti Arrested in Murder Conspiracy

In recent years, John A. Gotti, once the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, has become something of an elusive bull’s-eye for federal prosecutors. In just over a year, Mr. Gotti was prosecuted three times on charges relating to organized crime, but each time the case ended in a mistrial. Prosecutors decided in October 2006 to drop the case.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Gotti was arrested on federal conspiracy charges, linking him to the killings of three men in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, federal authorities said.

According to an indictment, handed up in Tampa, Fla., Mr. Gotti, 44, is accused of conspiracy to commit murder in the killings of George Grosso in 1988, Louis DiBono in 1990 and Bruce John Gotterup in 1991. He has also been accused of possessing and trafficking in more than five grams of cocaine. If convicted on all charges, Mr. Gotti could face life in prison.

Mr. Gotti was arrested at his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Tuesday morning and appeared in the United States District Court in Manhattan in the afternoon. He is to be formally charged in Tampa, where federal prosecutors are handling the case because, authorities said, some of the Gambinos’ operations are based there.

Mr. Gotti, who is being held without bail, will plead not guilty, said Seth Ginsberg, one of his lawyers.

“We’re confident that there is no strength to the allegations and that he will prevail once again,” Mr. Ginsberg said in an interview.

But Elie Honig, an assistant United States attorney, told a magistrate judge, Ronald L. Ellis, that Mr. Gotti was a dangerous man accused of many serious offenses.

Photo

John A. Gotti, 44, was arrested on federal conspiracy charges at his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Tuesday morning.Credit
Courtesy WNBC

“The defendant ordered and oversaw the three murders,” Mr. Honig said. “He’s led a life of violence.”

Mr. Gotti, known as Junior, is the son of John J. Gotti, who received the nickname the Teflon Don because he evaded several convictions from 1984 to 1990. The elder Mr. Gotti was convicted in 1992 of authorizing the killing of Mr. DiBono, who was found shot seven times — with four bullets to his head — slumped in a Cadillac sedan in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. Mr. Gotti received a life sentence and died in prison in 2002 at age 61, having made the family name synonymous with organized crime.

Five other men who prosecutors said were members of the Gambino crime family were also listed in the indictment.

At a news conference in Tampa, an assistant United States attorney, Robert E. O’Neill, said that the alleged criminal acts involved “the Gambino crime family reaching out to the Tampa Bay area,” and that the investigation had a wide range, including work by federal investigators in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Philadelphia and Tampa.

The indictment includes sweeping accusations of racketeering against Mr. Gotti from 1983 through July of this year. During that time, Mr. Gotti held several positions in the Gambino crime family, according to the indictment, including de facto boss.

Mr. Gotti insisted at each of his previous trials that he had left the Mafia life.

Charles Carnesi, one of Mr. Gotti’s lawyers who represented him in court on Tuesday, told Judge Ellis that the government had unfairly made his client a target because there is “a group in law enforcement that are disgruntled.”

In September 2005, after a six-week federal trial that included charges that Mr. Gotti ordered the June 1992 kidnapping of Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a WABC radio talk-show host, a divided jury failed to reach verdicts on three charges — kidnapping, racketeering and extortion and conspiracy — and voted not guilty on a fourth charge of securities fraud.

Retrials on the three unresolved charges ended with deadlocked juries in March 2006 and September 2006.

Prosecutors have had one victory against Mr. Gotti. In 1999, he was sentenced to nearly six and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to six charges: bribery, conspiring to extort money, understating his income on a loan application, running an illegal gambling operation, understating his income on a tax return and loan-sharking. He was released in 2005.

Correction: August 7, 2008

Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the arrest of John A. Gotti, once the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, on federal conspiracy charges linking him to the killings of three men in New York, misidentified the court in which Mr. Gotti appeared. It was the United States District Court in Manhattan, not the State Supreme Court.